Kurdish Vernacular Learning as Indigenous Knowledge: Decolonizing Ottoman Cultural and Intellectual History

This contribution explores in what ways the Kurdish experience may be called “colonial” and, by extension, what decolonizing Kurdish studies would or could amount to. Specifically, it explores whether and to what extent Kurdish vernacular learning may be qualified as “Indigenous learning” as it appears in decolonial critiques. The article suggests a genealogical approach to the epistemic dimensions of coloniality to explicate the radical historicity of knowledge and to make visible relations of domination and resistance in the field of knowledge and learning. Early modern Kurdish vernacular learning, it will be argued, was produced under the domination of Persian and Arabic, and to some extent it amounted to heresy, that is, an act of symbolic resistance. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the vernacularization of Kurdish language and learning in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire and in Mollah Mahmûdê Bayazîdî’s encounter with nineteenth-century Russian imperialism and Orientalism.